Father Xmas

They also require a system to eject players under 16 at midnight till 6am, this includes at home online console gaming, not just from gaming cafes.

Oh BTW, great news site link. Interesting to see Korean gaming news and what they are promoting as features in games.

That assumes that got that far. I think he made the jump that if Vivendi is trying to sell off Activision Blizzard it must be because it isn't doing well not because it's valuable.

The same business logic might help to explain why NCSoft didn't initially look into selling off the studio and game. It really wasn't all that profitable so why would anybody be interested in buying it?

That's not what it says. ARRRGG!, people can't read business speak.

Vivendi is a big French conglomerate that bought the company that owned Blizzard, Sierra and other game/educational software companies in 2000 and renamed it Vivendi Games. In 2008 they bought Activision and renamed this unit to Activision Blizzard. They also owned until recently a large part of NBC Universal (USA, Bravo, SyFy. Telemundo, The Weather Channel, CNBC, MSNBC, part of Hulu) until they sold their share to GE.

Vivendi is having financial difficulties and that IGN article talked about them thinking of selling off their stake (they don't own the whole thing) in Activision Blizzard to help Vivendi pay down their debt. The problem is nobody has the money it'll take to buy Activision Blizzard since it's estimated Vivendi's portion is worth $8 BILLION (of $13.4 billion). NCSoft, based on what Nexon paid for 14.7% of it's stock, is only $4.9 billion. While NCSoft had a total revenue in 2011 of around $550 million, Activision Blizzard had over $1 BILLION in profits, AFTER taxes, in 2011.

Vivendi isn't trying to sell their stake in Activision Blizzard because there's problems with Activision Blizzard, they are trying to sell it to raise money, just like when it sold off it's stake in NBC Universal.

Show me the source of that $2 million profit number. NCSoft never reported profit or loss numbers for studios or games, just game revenue.

I would be surprised if we have a November 31st.

Same jump to conclusion (she's not wearing any pants) used when Nausicaa was turned into Warriors of the Wind.

That might just be part of the whole "realignment of company focus." Further investigation shows that the ad agency is the one ArenaNet was using to hype GW2, so now they are offically using it for to represent the all of their games in the west.

True but we could have a million players and if they are only bringing in the revenues of 50-60K pre-Freedom subscribers does player numbers matter?

Yes, it's listed in the Aug 2012 Investor's Relation's presentation (IR_Report_ENG_1208) as Carbine Studio (under NCSoft Corporation). PS was listed as Paragon Studios (under NC Interactive).

Interestingly enough, the entity called NC West doesn't appear in any of the charts or reports. That may just be the name used to encompass NCSoft's western interests.

Edit: Searching around about info on NCSoft West, I found that they hired, in the same week as our closure announcement and GW2's rollout, a new advertising agency.

We haven't been at those numbers for years, more like half that number.

We are a $10 million a year game that's owned by a company that had direct game revenues of $500 million in 2011. We are a small town with a K-mart and Sears decided to close it because it doesn't bring in enough sales. Of course the townsfolk are ticked off since they now have to drive 40 minutes round trip to get to the nearest discount department store. And if everyone in town vowed never to spend another dime in a Sears or K-mart, would that loss of revenue matter to a company that large? No. That what happened to that town would alter the shopping habits of the public at large? No.

We can try to raise awareness but most people will simply draw the conclusion that superhero MMOs aren't all that popular while the rest would admire or ridicule our attempts to keep the game going but few if any would boycott a game company simply because it shuttered a small game. That would be like hipster west coasters boycotting Apple products due to working conditions in China.

Today's game media is telling everyone that GW2 is the cat's meow so MMO players with a little extra cash (since it's a buy once, no subscription) to give it a try. TSW sells only 200K copies while GW2 sells 2 million. What does that say about subscription based MMOs or MMOs that stray to far out of the fantasy world genre or standard MMO trope gameplay?

Don't know about that. Carbine is directly controlled by the parent company in Korea so I would imagine they would have plenty of oversight and the look reminds me a JRPGs like Phantasy Star Online and action/combo/block attacks tells me that it's not our old school "press key, watch animation, cool down, press key" style.

Yes it's not hyper stylized like GW2 or Blade & Soul but I don't think it's a complete cultural disconnect like spandex clad super heroes.

I don't think any studio actually believes they can develop a "WoW-killer" anymore. WoW was the exception, not the rule. The industry has tried known IPs like Star Wars, Star Trek, Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, Conan, Pirates of the Caribbean, DC Comics and none of them came anywhere close to WoWs success.

And since GW2 isn't subscription based but box set sales plus item store based it will never come close to WoW's revenue numbers. As for Blade and Soul, if I was NCSoft I would worry that game may take away players from Aion so they may not end up with similar bump in revenues that Aion had when it first came out. In 2009 they were telling investors that 2012 would be a 1 trillion KrW year but it would be lucky IMO to have 650 billion in gross revenues this year even with 2 million GW2 sales in Q3 and whatever revenue B&S generates worldwide.

What hurt NCSoft last quarter was the combination of lower income, 22.7 million KrW less when compared with Q2 2011 and 40.8 million KrW higher operating costs, mostly due to the digestion of Ntreev who they bought during Q1 2012 (only 2.8 million KrW was due to marketing).

I know people want someone or something to point a finger at and shout "The one in the braces, he done it!". So far we've had ArenaNet/Guild Wars 2, Cryptic/Perfect Entertainment, Nexon and now Blade & Soul. How about worldwide economic downturn and/or diluted MMO player numbers due to the glut of MMOs on the market. Even the great and powerful WoW is down nearly 25% since it's peak. However that might go up again soon since I just starting to see their Kung-Fu panda expansion advertised on TV, which they can do since they are still collecting over $100 million a month in subscriptions Vs $10 million a year with us.

Again, those numbers are revenue, income before costs are deducted, so not profit. Those terms are not interchangeable.